I have been tagged by Isabel to answer a meme--how does your reading and your life intersect. I recently posted about art and literature. It seems as though art in my life and books I am reading are intersecting at the moment. Sometimes it is serendipitous how reading can intersect with other aspects of my life, and other times one book leads to another and I follow a sort of meandering path as each book leads me to the next. It is probably not too surprising that I read certain types of books as they reflect things in my life that I like and take an interest in. I can trace art/fiction books back (this year anyway) to Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman (in part about Hans Holbein), which lead eventually to Elizabeth Hickey's The Wayward Muse (still must look for books about the Pre-Raphaelites and would love to find a photo of Jane Burden), leading to my museum visit to see an exhibit of Impressionist paintings, and culminating with my planned read of Susan Vreeland's Luncheon of the Boating Party. The painting is by Renoir and I saw several of his paintings at the exhibit (it's a pity the Luncheon painting was not one of them!).
While not exactly the same, I think it is interesting when books intersect with each other in an entirely unplanned way. I have started reading Shakespeare, and now am reading Cervantes. Both lived and wrote at about the same time, and both died on April 23, 1616. I wonder if they read each other's works? Both are iconic figures in literature. I have been trying to learn more about Shakespeare extracurricularly from my reading (mostly through documentaries). Recently I finished Virginia Woolf's Night and Day. I have also started reading Katherine Mansfield's Journal. From what little I have read about Mansfield she was particularly affected by WWI and wrote scathingly of Woolf's novel, which dealt with Edwardian society yet did not mention the War at all. I just started reading Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. It turns out that Ford Madox Brown, a Pre-Raphaelite painter mentioned in The Wayward Muse was Ford Madox Ford's grandfather. Poor David Copperfield (who I have been unintentionally ignoring) was written by Charles Dickens who happens to be Monica Dickens's grandfather. I am nearly finished reading her Mariana. And in Mariana, Gerald Du Maurier is mentioned, who was Daphne Du Maurier's father (and was an actor), and I am reading about the Du Mauriers in Margaret Forster's biography.
Should I go on? I think I have exhausted the crossed paths more or less. This is what you get when you read a certain types of books over and over, I guess. After a while they all connect in some strange and not so strange ways.